Sea Monkey Photographs

A response to Nathaniel Lee's "Sea Monkey" in Mirror Shards:

“You have to relax,” said Sydney, “or you can't see it.”

“I can't see it anyway,” Pat grumbled.

“Just sit on the deck-chair and sip your drink and let your mind... wander.”

There was a silence. “Holy crap,” said Pat. He turned his head. “Hey!”

“Don't look directly at it!” said Sydney.

“A monkey...”

“Yes.”

“It was blue.” Pat looked down. “What's in these drinks?”

“I don't think it's the drinks,” said Sydney, pointing. At the buffet table, a bowl of oranges stealthily hovered, lifted by invisible paws...

My scene, "Sea Monkey Photographs":

"Hey Brad, " said Pat. Brad closed his eyes remembering that Pat's vacation had ended and he was back in the office. Couldn't Brad's boss leave Brad alone and let him get some work done?

"I hope you didn't miss me while I was gone. I had a fabulous vacation and we saw sea monkeys."

"Sea monkeys?" asked Brad looking up from his computer terminal.

"Yeah, Sydney and I saw them down on the beach in Costa Rica. Here take a look at this," said Pat as he twiddled with his iPhone to select the pictures app and passed his phone to Brad.

The photograph was of a glass-top patio table laden with corrugated muffin wrappers and crumpled paper coffee cups. A brown-breasted sparrow pecked at the crumbs on the table. "Where is this sea monkey?"

Pat leaned over Brad's cubicle wall and pointed at the waves crashing against the beach shore above the table. The photo wasn't very clear, typical of camera phones, but Brad didn't see any life. Perhaps, Pat was just excited about some particular way that the waves crested and which the locals had named.

"Very nice," said Brad handing back the phone. He hoped that Pat would go away. He needed to finish the lab writeup for the latest results before the afternoon meeting.